Port Credit Pictures, iMovie Video on YouTube, Animoto

Doing some trial videos and animations using my travel pictures before my next trip. Using the video option on my camera is fairly new to me, as are the animoto.com still picture animations. Editing video using iMovie, which came with my Macbook, is also very new. I want to become familiar with all of them before I travel.

To share iMovies on my blog or website, I create the iMovie first, and choose the Share on YouTube option. Once the iMovie has been uploaded to YouTube, I can highlight and copy the html / embed codes and paste them into a Blogger Layout Gadget Html widget. The default YouTube width is a little too wide for some blog templates, so I edit this size to reduce the number of pixels for iMovie height and width shown in code by about 20 percent each.

My Canon digital video option and iMovie are a bit of a learning curve, but that's the fun of it. And for animation, that's a lot of fun, too: to take random old photos, add music and animation, and get a new way of sharing your travel pictures or family photos.

For the animation, I used the free version of animoto.com. You can experiment; it's fairly intuitive and easy to follow. While animoto asks you upload 12-15 images, I found that on my first attempt, only 4 of the 8 images were used in the animation. But when I edited that version, and changed my music selection to a faster tempo tune, all of the pictures I uploaded appeared in the final product. The resolution looks fine viewed on animoto, and not as good on YouTube. Likely will have to choose YouTube HQ option before playing.

Here's the first animoto.com version:


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And here's the aminoto version using the same pictures with different (faster tempo) sound track:


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When your video animation is complete, you can choose how to share it -- YouTube, MySpace, emails, etc. But I wanted the embed code to post here on the blog myself.

It took me a minute to find the embed code: After you Play your video, there are buttons below the screen. Choose the thumb tack one (embed). The first screen that comes up has all the sharing options. Look at the top and you'll see the default screen is Post. Click on the Embed button to the right of the Post; the code for your video is in the box. Copy and paste into a web page/blog.


I let animoto post this same video on youtube (link YouTube)



When you are logged into YouTube, you can edit as usual, and get the YouTube embed and link code. And since I haven't been on a trip anywhere recently to shoot new video, I rely on my lovely Port Credit Ontario surrounds for inspiration and material.

My earlier videos were pre-iMovie (link) editing capabilities. Here's the link for one of my first iMovies (when I got up the nerve to speak.)

Practice makes perfect, and I look forward to gaining a lot more skill!